Typhoon In a Raiding Environment

I just want to talk about a much maligned balance ability (at least in the context of raiding):
Typhoon - you summon a violent Typhoon that does 1190 Nature damage when in contact with hostile targets, knocking them back and dazing them for 3 sec.

Two caveats:
Typhoon has no place in a single-target build/rotation.  It's inefficient, is minimal dps even if you only use it while moving, and is difficult to use.
Unglyphed Typhoon is a tank's nightmare, and I've never found a good use for it in pve.  Eliminating the knockback is key, and there's no excuse as it's just a minor glyph.



So with that said, there is one situation where Typhoon shines and is absolutely amazing in a raid - burst aoe dps.  The reason for this is because of Typhoon's interaction with two talents every raiding moonkin should have:
Nature's Grace  - Typhoon will almost always proc this.  This means that you if you use Typhoon and then hurricane with the 20% haste, you will actually cast both spells in less time then an unhasted hurricane - meaning the damage from Typhoon is extra, it doesn't cost you any time to use.
Omen of Clarity - Typhoon has a pretty good chance of proccing OoC, which significantly defrays the cost when you follow it with a hurricane.


Now burst aoe dps is a pretty narrow nitch, but there are three difficult fights I like to use it on:
1) Freya 3-Elder:  This is probably the best fight for it, in my experience.  My detonating lasher phases look something like:
Typhoon->Hurricane->Hurricane->Starfall while adds are pulled away->Hurricane->Typhoon to finish them off

And as a secondary benefit, Typhoon is useful as instant damage to kill the roots (although they are much easier now because trinkets/freedom/shifting removes them), or on the triplet phase if you can arrange to hit all three.  But I find its best use to be in that lasher phase where it can really pump up the damage you put out.
2) Yogg-Saron, Alone in the Darkness:  Typhoon can be really huge in phase three as it really increases your damage on the adds - and lowering add health fast is pretty key to keeping tanks alive.  I do find it's not as useful as I originally thought, because you can't always turn around for Sanity reasons.
3) Anub'arak, Heroic 25:  While you will generally not be chaining aoe on this fight, a Typhoon->Hurricane near the start of each add set can be really big burst dps.  You may not need to aoe on this fight, but we find limited caster aoe helps get the adds down (NOTE: I have not killed this boss, this is only what I have done on progression - so take this with a grain of salt.  It does match with information I've gotten from other guilds that use limited caster aoe to help with adds).


There are of course other fights where Typhoon is useful (Kolo, Razorscale, etc) but they're not too difficult so I won't really go into them.  But the above three are the fights where I find Typhoon to be worth the marginal single-target dps loss of dropping a point from Improved Insect Swarm.